Social media as tools for identity development among Latine and White LGBTQ+ youth

• In Event: Adolescents’ Cultural Contexts and Competencies across Digital Landscapes

Abstract

Cultural contexts for LGBTQ+ identity development in the U.S. have been described in terms of generational cohorts and a cultural-historic queer experience at particular moments in history (Weststrate & McLean, 2022). The Cyber Queer Generation, born in the 2000s, often report increased feelings of agency with online media to find information and likeness amongst peers (Bates et al., 2020; Craig & McInroy, 2014), yet most studies focus on White youth. To document cultural variations in the Cyber Queer Generation, we interviewed diverse LGBTQ+ adolescents about their lived experiences with social media.

Participants were 20 LGBTQ+ adolescents between 16-19 years of age with varying gender and sexual identities living in a mostly white, liberal small city. The sample was primarily White (45%) and Latine (25%), with an additional 15% of participants identifying as being multiracial White/Latine. To capture lived experiences, semi-structured interviews were conducted as social media tours—audiovisual recordings of participants guiding researchers through their past and current social media posts on their most used platforms while providing context and interpretations (Manago et al., 2021). A reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) was implemented, which identified five strategies for queer identity construction that often functioned differently for our Latine and White participants.

In one theme, finding security through boundary negotiation, Latine participants were learning to construct boundaries to control visibility from their family and community. They discussed identity exploration as a navigation of complex relationships between their queerness and their cultural identity:

“I made the main [Instagram] account when I was 17/16, and I was still with my family, but they were restrictive, so I didn't subscribe to a lot of people because I didn't want them to see what I was doing […] they didn't treat my brothers the same way, I think it's a Mexican thing, they treat their sons like their babies and treat their girls like, ah, *slap sound effect* [...] it was disappointing because I did everything and it was never enough and I was like well if I'm queer there's my reason.”

White participants, especially those with additional privileged identities, tended to describe fewer constraints in their self-presentations:

“I am cis and I am white so I think more people have felt [like they didn't belong] more than I have ... I think because I’m the "acceptable kind of gay" that I’ve never really felt that I didn’t fit in (140).”

These youth were learning to construct boundaries around what information they would share with their imagined social media audiences in the process of constructing authenticity through masspersonal communication.
Results also demonstrate cultural differences in adolescents’ use of social media for social expression (similar to “active use”), media expression (similar to “passive use”), conceptualizing queerness (learning what it means to be queer), and coding queerness (self-expression that signals belonging to community) .

Through rich examples of youth’s lived experiences online, the study illustrates the importance of cultural environments in shaping how LGBTQ+ youth use social media in their identity development.

Authors

• Zachary Allen Keith, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author

• Adriana Maria Manago, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Mars Garcia, University of California, Santa Cruz